T. Belman. The problem all along was that there wasn’t a unified opposition to support. When Obama decided to oust Assad with the support of Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood, Russia and Iran were not on the scene. Had they been, Obama would never have decided to oust him. The big mistake was that he let the situation get away from him. In fact he invited it when he cut a deal Russia to avoid entering the fray himself because of the red line being crossed. After that Obama was a non-player.
As for unlimited cruelty, that’s war. Winning is all that matters especially when your life depends on it.
If he didn’t maintain the lie of opposition to Assad remaining in power, he would have avoided the suffering caused to so many Syrians.
U.S. President Barack Obama looked tired, even defeated, at his final press conference for 2016, which may be his last as president. He listed his achievements of the past eight years, but it wasn’t a press conference of a satisfied president, but rather of a leader worried about his country’s democracy and unable to influence the main events abroad – above all the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo.
“We all know what needs to happen. There needs to be an impartial international observer force in Aleppo that can help coordinate an orderly evacuation through safe corridors,” Obama said.
“There has to be full access for humanitarian aid, even as the United States continues to be the world’s largest donor of humanitarian aid to the Syrian people. And beyond that, there needs to be a broader cease-fire that can serve as the basis for a political rather than a military solution.”
He added: “We should also be reminded that to be an American involves bearing burdens and meeting obligations to others.”
If all those things have to happen, and Americans have an obligation to bear the burden, what’s the president’s solution to the crisis in Aleppo? The United States will continue to pressure the UN Security Council to do something; in other words, the same policy that has been useless for Syrians for nearly six years.
Obama also explained why he has done nothing effective to solve the Syrian crisis, and why he will continue to do nothing to help Aleppo’s besieged residents. The cost is simply too high. He said he and his staff spent weeks discussing solutions to the Syrian crisis, but ultimately he decided he had done all he could in Syria “without the support of the international community and Congress.”
He said that in the present circumstances, where there is no united opposition in Syria that could take control of the country, when a world power like Russia is willing to do anything necessary to defend its protectorate, and a regional power like Iran considers Syria its vital interest, “It was going to be impossible to do this on the cheap.” That is, “short of putting large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground, uninvited,” as he put it.
Unbridled violence
Let’s assume that during those weeks all the other options really were thoroughly examined and rejected. Why did Obama and his advisers decide there was no point in pressuring Russia at its weak points? Imagine for a moment what Russian President Vladimir Putin would have done if Georgia and Ukraine had suddenly entered the fast track for acceptance into NATO and received unprecedented U.S. military assistance.
If Russia’s protectorate tyrannies in Central Asia had to deal with a protest wave with outside encouragement, if Russia’s beleaguered opposition suddenly received broad support from “unknown sources,” and if the media reports about Putin stealing billions were confirmed, would Putin devote his energy to committing atrocities in Syria?
Even before the president made the conclusion, people in the Oval Office concluded that military force was too great a gamble, one that wouldn’t make the Russians compromise in Syria. And the Pentagon experts were unable to craft plans for a limited military intervention to protect aid workers without promising to occupy all of Syria.
The bottom line: The leader of the free world announced over the weekend that he can’t do anything to solve the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time, or even to moderate it. He made clear that countries can exercise unbridled violence against civilians to achieve geostrategic interests, and that cruelty is becoming a legitimate tool in international relations. That’s why Obama’s talk about “bearing burdens and meeting obligations” sounds like a sad joke.
It’s true that atrocities like those in Syria have occurred in many places around the world since World War II, with varying degrees of attention paid by the international community. Aside from the well-known examples of Rwanda or Bosnia, millions of people died between 1998 and 2003 in the fighting in Central Africa known as Africa’s world war. The world didn’t do a thing.
And Putin showed his ability to resort to inconceivable cruelty in suppressing the uprising in Chechnya. The international community ignored it.
Cruelty pays
But we have to recall that today the International Criminal Court’s authority is repeatedly being questioned, the Western countries are focusing on internal affairs, and the UN Security Council is unable to prevent atrocities even in places about which there’s a consensus. (Only Friday the Security Council reconfirmed the mandate of the UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, the same force that can’t stop the fighting in a country that a UN investigator has described as “on the brink of an all-out ethnic civil war.”
The broadcast of Aleppo’s horrors on social networks makes clear that cruelty pays and the international justice system that was established after World War II is powerless. Obama’s despair and failure to act show that in direct contrast to what the president claims, Bashar Assad can “slaughter his way to legitimacy” – to borrow a phrase from the president. This is because the countries of the West, in particular the United States, are unwilling to pay the price of stopping him.
Finally, if the president and his advisers invested such a long time in examining every option on the Syrian issue, they must also have analyzed the option they chose – the option of doing nothing. And if they decided they couldn’t do anything to prevent Assad and Putin from achieving their goals by force, why did they maintain the lie of their opposition to Assad remaining in power?
Why didn’t they announce two years ago, a year ago or six months ago that the political solution for Syria would include Assad and force it on the rebel groups still pinning their hopes on Washington?
Such a decision would have damaged the United States’ reputation as the leader of the free world, made clear to any tyrant that he can remain in power if he exercises enough force, and stifled the hope for democratization all over the world.
In that way we would have reached the place where we are now, but we would have avoided the suffering caused to Syrians all those months when Obama claimed he was working for the right values but knew he wouldn’t dare pay the price of realizing them.
As Trump pointed out in the debates, if you warn the enemy you will attack ahead of time, they will evacuate the leadership. Corridors? Isis has Syrian passport printing machines. We don’t even know who we let into America!
I don’t think Obama made any mistakes. I think he’s an Islamist mole. Twice over, first into the radical Left and then into the reformist Left. A triple agent.
Alistair Maclean’s most fun novel was about triple agents in Yugoslavia during WWII. “Partisans.”
Not so much fun in our elected and appointed officials. See: Huma Abedin. Van Jones. Keith Ellison. and on and on.
Can’t find the reference now but in his first term the guy Obama appointed to oversee the downsizing of the military — was it Secretary of Defense? — years before had a Soviet-linked organization that called for unilateral U.S. disarmament. The Soviet backed U.S. Peace Council used to meet in his office I remember reading in Front Page Magazine. He hired Wendy somebody who was one of the negotiators who lost N. Korea to Nukes under Clinton as the chief negotiator with Iran and she had no political or diplomatic background! She was a children’s teacher or something. You telling me this guy wanted to succeed? Ha Ha. Goes out of his way to overthrow friendly regimes in Libya and Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood waiting in the wings. Gives CAIR and Muslim Brotherhood operatives the run of the White House, let’s them oversea intelligence, police, political correctness. Spins every atrocity with calls against “Islamofauxbia?” At different times as an adult, he was first a Marxist Leninist, then an Alinskyite, then a Black Nationalist and then a liberal when it came time to aim for higher places. You telling me this is random? Can I interest you in a bridge?
Actually, for me the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time is the relentless stalking, abuse and slaughter of the Jewish people by terror groups, NGO’s,the UN, nations, in a continuing ongoing endeavor. What is happening now in the arab naitons and europe is what has been happening, and caused by those same suffering now, to the Jewish people at their hands.
LOL, what jokers these haaretz writers are….. this same “unbridled violence being leveled against civilians to achieve geostrategic interests” has long been a “legitimate tool in international relations” against the Jews and Israel. The same europeans and muslims are now suffering exactly that which they made the Jews and Israel suffer… they never ceased their unbridled violence against the Jews… either directly or by libel and funding. Almost everyone now suffering was part of that evil.
they are being engulfed in confusion, chaos and contradiction:
the pope advises to welcome muslims to euros and the catholic charities are paid billions to settle them while christians who marched with muslims to call for jew killing are being slaughtered by muslims in the mid east and elsewhere.
The liars are being brought to the guillotine and Haaretz is part of that network of liars spreading libels on Jews which result in the murder of jews by muslims funded by euros.
and yet we never see those burdens and obligations shouldered by the political and economic elite.. its for us lumpen to do and die.
no, it makes clear that the fake news that haaretz is part of broadcast the same “horrors” at Jenin and gaza… later we saw their lies, editing of video, fake stories, etc. and the tens of thousands at Jenin became 56 with almost half IDF soldiers. Since then I dont accept any of these horror stories as fact. The boys have been crying wolf for decades and now I dont listen to them anymore. There is no reliable evidence of the extent of the “horrors” and who did it. Haaretz can take some credit for that along with the global MSM. I havent forgot the regular marches of kill the Jews from all those muslims now killing each other in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, etc. Perhaps if Haaretz was not always publishing fake news of Israel apartheid, child killing etc we would take their “news” seriously.
I see no reason for americans to fight and die in those nations except to extinguish direct threats which can be achieved with napalm and carpet bombing like in Dresden, viet nam and Japan
If the euro idiots want to take in the muslims when no GCC nation, who actually are part of the cause is taking them in, I dont care.
ronel, the author, and the haaretz have proliferated fake news for years so there is no reason to listen to them now. this is what happens to the boy who cried wolf
We dont know who crossed the “red line” of chem weapons.. whether Assad or the GCC jihadis. We could rely on the CIA, the MSM…. but then wasnt the CIA telling us lots of things that werent true and didnt the MSM say that Israel is apartheid child killers and commited a massacre of tens of thousands at Jenin? Didnt they use the same local reporters at Jenin and in gaza that they used in Syria to show atrocities complete with lots of videos? In fact, isnt the fake news outlet carrying this story part of the whole BDS lying delgitimization campaign on Israel?
Obama’s mistake was that the US gov involvement was caught supplying weapons to so called democracy seeking rebels in Bhengazi and obviously through hacking unsecure servers of clinton and others the russians, syrians or iranians got all the info and perhaps even killed stevens to screw up the weapons purchasing and shipping to foreign mercentaries in syria through Turkey. Its likel that the russians not only threatened to expose and publicize the whole thing but blackmailed them into backing off in syria… after all… that exposure with real evidence would land obama, hillary, the cia and the top military brass in jail. I am all for the jihadis slaughtering each other in any of their lands but lets not pretend that the US was not part of this whole fake set of democratic twitter revolutions all around the med basin and througn the syrian iraqi pipeline demarcated lands. Obama had to back off, the russians had him by the gonads. They even gave him the face saving device of the chem weapon deal of the russians removing chem weapons. the whole arab spring was an orchestrated destabilization process using twitter to activate the moles and fake orgs to protest as a cover for infiltrating the foreign muslim jihadis.